There’s a new word running up and down the halls of our school and that word is RIGOR. Teachers have been both praised and slanted by administration in the past month and a half for the respective abundance or lack of rigor in their classroom.

“Now that class is rigorous,” “That lesson was full of rigor,” or “Where was the rigor in that?” were some of the exit lines of a Learning Walk I accompanied my principal and assistant principal on last week.

The problem is that they know what they are looking for when they pull out their rigor rulers during classroom pop-in’s but many of us teachers don’t. Getting a privileged ear before and after the quick five minute “mini-observations” that made up our Learning Walk, I gathered the following about what they are looking for in terms of rigor: